New Year's resolutions for Chicago jazz lovers

January 01, 2014|Howard Reich

New Year's resolutions inspire improvements, and Chicago jazz could use a few.

Here are one listener's resolutions for what ought to happen in 2014:

Upgrade Jazz Fest

The perpetually cash-strapped Chicago Jazz Festival made a quantum leap forward in 2013, belatedly leaving its dismal home in Grant Park for the far superior Millennium Park. But this should be the beginning — not the end — of changes to a festival that has been eclipsed by bigger, better, bolder events in Montreal, San Francisco, Detroit and beyond. City planners, who produce the Chicago Jazz Festival, should partner with clubs and concert halls to expand the reach and deepen the budget of the event. There's no reason this festival shouldn't also embrace concerts at Symphony Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Old Town School of Folk Music and other auditoriums. In addition, the city should give the hook to the bloviating emcees whose amateurish lectures diminish the festival; move the enormous, blinding LED screen off the Pritzker Pavilion stage and onto the lawn, where it belongs; improve the often harsh sound at the adjoining tents, or "pavilions," as they've been grandiloquently titled; and consider appointing an artistic director who could expand this festival's reach well beyond downtown and bring it up to 21st century standards.

Get WBEZ jazzed

WBEZ-FM 91.5 famously turned its back on jazz several years ago, dropping most of the music under orders from former boss Torey Malatia. What did we get in the nighttime slots instead? Canned talk shows, reruns and other freeze-dried offerings. Malatia left last year, but the pre-recorded blather continues all night, most of it utterly generic and having little to do with Chicago. Tune into WBEZ and you'd often have no idea you're listening to a Chicago station (if you didn't already know it). Surely after-dark jazz broadcasts of the sort the station offered for decades would have a greater connection to this city and its cultural lifeblood than multiple hours of the BBC World Service (just what you want to hear when you're unwinding at the end of a long work day).

Save the CJE

Yes, we know that Columbia College Chicago is going through financial belt-tightening, hence its decision to put its Chicago Jazz Ensemble on hiatus in 2012. But this great band — founded in 1965 by one of Columbia's most esteemed professors, William Russo — deserves much better than to be left in perpetual purgatory. Moreover, the band's annual budget is slight in the grand scheme of things: approximately $600,000 a year, with half from earned revenue and grants, half from the college, former president Warrick Carter told me in 2012. For this sum, the CJE gave Columbia a national and international profile, thanks to the ensemble's critically acclaimed concerts and tours. The same strategy was pursued decades earlier when the eminent American composer William Schuman, who headed the Juilliard School of Music starting in 1945, launched the Juilliard String Quartet. "And that quartet has meant more to Juilliard than everything else combined," he told me in 1986, "because the public doesn't know that (singer) Leontyne Price received her whole training at Juilliard, as have so many others. But the Juilliard Quartet — that they know." It's time for Columbia to realize what the CJE did for the school, and what it can do in the future. Revive this invaluable institution.

Jazz up the Showcase

Because impresario Joe Segal has been presenting music in Chicago since 1947, he ranks among the most admired presenters in the country, his Jazz Showcase known and respected by musicians and audiences around the world. But the old formulas aren't always bringing in audiences the way they used to, partly because many of the legends who routinely played the club are no longer living. Meanwhile, eclectic rooms across the city are presenting artists who ought to be heard at the Showcase. In the next few weeks, for instance, Evanston SPACE will feature New Orleans piano master Henry Butler (Jan. 23) and City Winery will spotlight the rising Crescent City pianist Jonathan Batiste (Jan. 13), both of whom would have brought welcome excitement to the Jazz Showcase. There are no easy answers here, but this club needs to embrace a wider range of local and national artists if it hopes to compete with the aforementioned venues, as well as with the Green Mill, Andy's, Symphony Center, the Auditorium Theatre, Millennium Park and an ever-growing list of institutions presenting jazz in Chicago these days.